Seeing is (Dis)believing

The backbone of Victorian spirit investigations rested with the credibility of the witnesses who attended spiritualist events such as séances. But how did someone become a credible witness of spirit or psychic phenomena? What were the processes by which their testimonies became trustworthy representations of genuine experiences? This paper explores these questions by examining the visual epistemology of the scientific naturalist and sceptic John Tyndall (1820–1893), as a way of understanding the politics of constructing scientific testimony during the late Victorian period. Visual epistemology can be defined as an embodied practice of observation that moves beyond merely being the physical act of looking at things to include a range of skilled activities. Key to this paper is an attempt to challenge earlier whiggish accounts in the historiography that have perpetuated the myth that science conquered spiritualism in the nineteenth century. Instead, it exposes a more complicated narrative about Victorian science’s uneasy relationship with spirit and psychic phenomena, and raises important questions about the authority and limit of scientific naturalism.

Naturalism, Quietism, and the Threat to Philosophy

<P>Two opposed movements of thought threaten philosophy as an autonomous practice from the inside: scientific naturalism and quietism. Naturalism (qua methodological thesis) threatens to turn philosophy into a mere <I>ancilla </I>of the sciences, quietism understood as the prescription to remain silent in philosophy would not countenance any more “positive” philosophy. This book reconstructs naturalism and quietism such that it becomes clear naturalism does have the potential to end philosophy as an autonomous practice and that quietism, correctly understood, does not. To this end, this book provides arguments against the prevailing orthodox status of naturalism and a heterogenous reading of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical quietism as the rejection of a certain kind of theories in philosophy, namely quasi-scientific theories.</P>

James and Psychical Research in Context

James’s open advocacy, practice, and defense of unrestrictedly empirical approaches to telepathy, mediumship, and other alleged “supernatural” phenomena was a central part of his work, yet it is still often misunderstood or passed over. By placing James back into an international network of contemporary elite intellectuals who were also preoccupied with reported occult phenomena as fundamental scientific anomalies that may or may not have spiritual significance, this chapter argues that James’s psychical research can be reconciled with the progressiveness for which his canonical ideas are often regarded. When appreciated within important political and medical contexts of his time, and in view of his long-term collaborations in the study of trance states and hallucinations in non-pathological populations with F. W. H. Myers and other figures connected to Henry Sidgwick in England, James’s psychical research was an integral part of his evolving experimental psychology. Growing out of James’s deep discontent with dogmatism in science and religion, his unorthodox work also shared mutual origins with his pragmatist and radical empiricist philosophy. Moreover, by illustrating the polemical nature of simultaneous attacks on James’s psychical research and pragmatism by fellow psychologists, and the employment of religious arguments by supposedly scientific critics, this chapter suggests the story of James and psychical research is a reminder that “scientific naturalism” as an inconsistently defined yet absolute standard of modern Western academic activity has grown out of concerns that were not as self-evidently science-based or humanistic as we may be accustomed to believe.

Archetypal Metaphysics and the Psyworld

I address Erik Goodwyn’s insightful and nuanced critique of my work on the essence of archetypes that have direct bearing on his own investigations of archetypal origins, attractor states, the mind-body problem, and on the question of metaphysics. Goodwyn’s work is grounded in scientific naturalism while I offer an onto-phenomenological methodology that is compatible with his own positions. The questions of embodiment, ground, holism, panpsychism, and esse in anima are examined in light of offering a preliminary framework for an archetypal metaphysics where I introduce a theory of psyworld.

Seeking out Epistemic Friction in the Philosophy of Religion

Philosophical practice does not take place in an intellectual or social vacuum, hence it is important to consider how we can improve our social environment when engaging in philosophical reflection. In this paper, I recommend that philosophers of religion seek out epistemic friction, by exposing themselves to viewpoints that are in tension with their own. I first provide an overview of work in experimental philosophy of religion that shows that philosophy of religion presents a distorted epistemic landscape that does not reflect the religious and ideological diversity of human reasoners at large and that privileges particular aspects of Christian theism and scientific naturalism. I respond to two potential objections against the call for increased epistemic friction: epistemic partiality and imaginative resistance. The paper concludes by outlining ways in which philosophers of religion can go outside of their comfort zone and engage more with alternative, under-represented points of view.